Introducing the '7 Figure Advisor' Podcast

[00:00:00] Nick: I just had a epiphany moment where I was just like, what am I doing here?

[00:00:02] Nick: Like I, I feel like I, this is not what I really want to do. I spent almost 20 years doing this. It's been rewarding. I've got travel a lot, I've learned a lot how had a decent amount of impact, but it's not really what I wanna do. It's like what do I love about what I do is helping people. ​

[00:00:46] Katie: Our guest today is a business coach to financial professionals, Nick Davies. Nick, thank you so much for joining us. We are really excited to have you with us today.

[00:00:55] Nick: Well, I appreciate it. I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:57] Katie: Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your background and what kind of got you into, this is a very specific niche that you have, so tell us a little bit about your backstory and what got you into this line of work that you do.

[00:01:11] Katie: I.

[00:01:12] Nick: Thank you. It's always interesting to reflect on my story and I, I always have this piece in the back of my mind and goes, who must to hear about my story? But isn't it interesting that we wanna

[00:01:20] Stan: hear about your story? Oh yeah. No,

[00:01:22] Nick: no. Go. I, I heard it. I appreciate it, but it's always interesting that pops up for me, you know, because I think.

[00:01:26] Nick: It's always fascinating to hear someone's story, but your own story is your own story. It's a different thing, but I spent 20 years working for big banks all over the world. Started out in London of course, and that's where I grew up and spent a lot of time working there and working in COO type roles, trading type roles, getting a lot of leadership experience, working with people in teams.

[00:01:45] Nick: And if I look back at that part of the journey, I can kind of see threads that got me to where I am now, but. Obviously I couldn't see at the time, but people fascinated me. Why do people do the things that they do or not as the case may be what motivates people to take the action or not take the action.

[00:02:00] Nick: And I ran teams from a young age and , run projects and programs of work and did a bunch of traveling. Left to do a bunch of traveling. I worked in Asia for a couple of years, which was an amazing experience and just really underscored how important communication. Is how important connectivity, community, relationship is.

[00:02:17] Nick: All that part really underpin under underpins everything, but certainly underpins business and, moved to America, back in 2012 or so, something like that. And I continued on the journey, of leadership and helping people. but it was a moment where I was working on Wall Street and, I just had a epiphany moment where I was just like, what am I doing here?

[00:02:36] Nick: Like I feel like I, this is not what I really want to do. I spent almost 20 years doing this. It's been rewarding. I've got travel a lot, I've learned a lot how had a decent amount of impact, but it's not really what I wanna do. It's like what do I love about what I do is helping people. And I found myself that actually what I was doing the last few years working in banking was just spending a lot of time with people, helping them get in into outcomes, getting clarity around their outcomes, helping them get to the next level.

[00:03:00] Nick: And I thought, that's what I wanna do. I wanna do that all the time. And I thought, I'm gonna be a coach. I'm gonna help people. Get to their outcomes, get really clear about it. And I didn't really know what a coach was at the time. I thought that sounds good. I'll go do that. And so long story short, I went to be a Tony Robbins coach for a number of years, and which was an amazing experience.

[00:03:18] Nick: super high standards for delivery of coached hundreds of Tony's clients. Great experience, great company. and then there was a point where I said, okay, I want go and create this for myself. I wanna create a business and I wanna work with business owners. And I started working with business owners.

[00:03:30] Nick: We moved to North Carolina. and I started gravitating towards financial advisors and I found myself with a bunch of financial advisor clients. And then I said, this seems like it makes sense for me. it seems like it's the place where I can add most value. I get the most fulfillment. And so I decided to a few years ago to be all in with financial advisors and that is absolutely my focus now.

[00:03:49] Nick: And as I mentioned to you, Stan, before we start going here, since you asked, my focus is to help a hundred thousand financial advisors in the next three years in any way I can.

[00:03:57] Stan: That's a big number and you're not gonna be able to meet with all those guys one on one. Right? So you've gotta have some approaches to do that, that allow you to clone yourself, right.

[00:04:07] Stan: To scale yourself. So I'm curious, what are the vehicles that you see that you're using to be able to bring that kinda leverage to impact a hundred thousand advisors?

[00:04:19] Nick: Yeah, absolutely. So think about Legacy, which is the show's about It's that frame in which I created that outcome and focus in order to.

[00:04:28] Nick: Create a big enough impact that it lasts. I gotta think with a big enough timeframe and a big enough volume of people, so helping a hundred thousand advisors, it's not something I'm gonna really be able to put a number on and say and count them all up because something like this for me counts as that in that vein, right.

[00:04:45] Nick: My goal here today is to share whatever I can that whoever's listening to this can just take a tiny little bit and make a maybe a tiny little adjustment in their life. So I'm never gonna know. But if I'm coming from that perspective, then the likelihood of hitting a higher number is gonna grow and then from a very specific point of view, of course, that I've got a few different programs that I focus on.

[00:05:05] Nick: So absolutely love working one-on-one with advisors. That's not scalable for me. I do have a couple of coaches in my team, which also help support me to do that as well. I work with teams as well. I work with small groups. I love bunch of advisors together, bunch of advisors together, which are kind of just adjacent to them.

[00:05:22] Nick: Just, I always think about a hundred meter race in the Olympics, the, I think about the men's or the Women's a hundred meter race. So watching that, it's like the flagship event and those. Eight men or women in that final, right? The guy that, or the lady that comes first gets the gold medal, gets all the marbles, right?

[00:05:37] Nick: And the person that comes eighth, nothing. But those people are so close to each other, they can learn from a lot from each other as well. So in that context, you can really see that stark difference. But I love to bring advisors together with a adjacent, they can learn the most from each in a facilitate group.

[00:05:51] Nick: So in, and also I believe a lot in study groups, which I call masterminds. And so I have a way of, I have a concept that. I give away in terms of how to set up your own mastermind, how to change your study group to a mastermind, how to hold the right standards to do that. And so, that product is something I give away in hopes of helping more advisors.

[00:06:09] Stan: That's interesting. And I think we have time. I'd like to drill into that, but let me say one, you know, one of the things that I understand from the research we've done. And preparing for this conversation with you is that you have distilled some concepts and ideas that you talk about, one of which is identifying the hub of your business.

[00:06:27] Stan: Talk to us a little bit about that. I gather that you get a sense that there's a lack of clarity and focus that people bring to their practice, and I guess what you're saying is you need to get a bit more clarity around what it is you're really good at and how to focus, but speak to that.

[00:06:42] Nick: Yeah, it's one of my favorite things.

[00:06:44] Nick: I see it often. When you first start out, whenever advisors first start out and really any business applies to, you start to get traction from pushing hard, right? From just going and doing the thing and you start to create momentum and it starts to Takes a pull on top of you, right?

[00:06:59] Nick: Like you, it takes a requirement for you to continue to deliver on things. And what happens is things just start to slow down because you're spending a lot of time on things that aren't revenue generating. Aren't building the business and your time takes away from that. So we know that it's important to, bring in staff members as quickly as you possibly can.

[00:07:15] Nick: Trade away the stuff that's not revenue producing, so you can focus on that as well. I find that advisors get that piece right. It's a big leap. And making that distinction is really important for advisors. But often what happens is they get that first assistant and then they think, okay, I need to another one.

[00:07:28] Nick: So here's my first. assistant processing, service stuff, I need someone in to come just to do new business applications or follow up and stuff. And now they've got two people. Now they've got two people that are reporting to them. Now they're suddenly having to be a leader and manager of people as well as a leader and manager of themselves and their business as well.

[00:07:46] Nick: And so that can stack, it can be 2, 3, 4 wide and suddenly now they've got four different relationships to think about, how do I help these people? I'm responsible for their part. They feel responsible for that And so I, what I find is it's really important to think about a hub, right? So you should think about having, if you've got one person, that person you should try and hire for them to continue to grow into the role that they've got.

[00:08:06] Nick: So let's say you are, you hire one person that's, or your initial assistant, which is really just gonna take some service work away from you. Great. You wanna think about long term, that person turning into a COO essentially. That person being the hub, where everything that is happening inside your business goes through him or her You are just there for decision making as well. So you want to protect yourself. It's a concept way of thinking, but it's also a practical way of setting up your business plan.

[00:08:30] Katie: That makes a lot of sense. And I noticed on your website, which we'll link in the show notes for everybody, it's the number seven figure advisor.com.

[00:08:39] Katie: You actually have a free ebook that they can download that has, kind of an overview, I guess on this, tell us about the ebook and a little bit about what kind of inspired you to write that and you're giving all this knowledge away for free, Nick. So tell us a little bit about the ebook.

[00:08:54] Nick: Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, you can get the ebook for free. No worries. That's how I help people, right? Giving the stuff away. I can't be everywhere at once. Um, but it was just those stories I kept he hearing from my advisors, working with a team. One, one guy, I'm thinking about writing, been in the business a long time, 35 years or so, does very well for himself now one assistant and then brought a couple of other like part-time assistants on as well.

[00:09:15] Nick: And instead of feeling like, okay, now I've got some relief from the other things I'm doing, suddenly it's just got now more people to manage. Right. Rather than taking the original assistant and saying, Hey, I'm bringing someone else in, they report to you. I want you to step up as a leader and make sure that I'm the person.

[00:09:29] Nick: I'm come. You come to me when I'm making decisions rather than having to manage it. Another way to think about this is am I always going out there trying to figure out what's going on, or are people coming to me and telling me what's going on? That's a huge distinction from a leadership type of role. So do I have someone out there that's working, my clients that I'm not working, I haven't got time to work because I can only practically look after a hundred households or so.

[00:09:52] Nick: I've got like hundreds of others that I was working. I've got a junior advisor in my team, which is calling on these books. Did I give them those names? And then am I having to go and check in with them every couple weeks and say, what's going on? Or did I define a process for which that they give those updates for me and they're coming to tell me where they are with it?

[00:10:11] Nick: Did I define expectations of how many they're gonna call? What the follow up system's gonna look like? How many meetings that I'm available to join them with on, on any given week? Did I set myself up to go upstream or am I constantly trying to do just a fish with a pole rather than kind of go upstream and having all those fish just come and float all over me?

[00:10:28] Katie: That's very interesting. And so would you say working with all of these different financial advisors, and I can relate to a little bit everything that you're saying. So many times we bring on new people to help with the workload and then it feels like it's actually creating a lot more work. Probably because of my leadership style maybe.

[00:10:46] Katie: So I really relate to what you're saying and see the wisdom in what you're saying with. Making sure that we're raising up other leaders and delegating some of those responsibilities so that one person does not have to be the hub for everything that happens. I love that. Talk to us a little bit about, you talk about this, I've seen you talk about it online, avoiding the slow sacrifice of ambition.

[00:11:09] Katie: Tell our listeners what that is and how they can avoid that.

[00:11:14] Nick: good research. I like that I mean, you can take this a couple of different ways, but for me right now, it's really important to think about being associated to what's really most important to you. Been associated to what's really important to you.

[00:11:27] Nick: It's very easy to get stuck in this drift. I was at a mastermind, which I was participating at the beginning of this year, and we talked about that a lot. And it's kind of like being in a little rowboat. you're one side, of the lake and trying to go to the other side of the lake, right?

[00:11:40] Nick: And you set off really excited about that ambition and getting to the other side of it. You run off fast in your rowboat and you kinda get to the middle where you are. You wanna take a break 'cause you want to, you know, stop and smell the roses for a little bit. And whilst you're doing that, you are not realizing that the current's still moving and the boat is drifting.

[00:11:56] Nick: And if you're not careful, you can look up and you're in a completely different place at the lake or so differently. You can look up and two years have gone by and where's my business gone? Why am I still at the same revenue levels? I'm stuck in the same old rotation over and over again. And so super important to think about association to what's important and why am I going there?

[00:12:15] Nick: And that's why the name of your podcast really resonates for me because you wanna be thinking about what is the legacy that I want to create? What's the pool that you're gonna constantly have in order to give you the motivation on a day on day basis? Right? And it's one thing to say about work ethic.

[00:12:29] Nick: I'll go out and I'll do the thing because I said that I would. But it's also should be something that inspires you to get to that. So that's the frame in which I look at that from.

[00:12:38] Stan: Yeah. So Nick, one thing that you do talk about, and this, probably obvious for everybody, certainly anybody who's been in business knows this, but you remind us of this, that the real secret to being able to grow is putting together a team of people that give you leverage.

[00:12:55] Stan: You call it building the dream team. I think everybody listening to this podcast at some level of consciousness knows that is true, but not all of us listening to this podcast have figured out how to crack the code on building a dream team. take a minute and tell us a couple secrets about how to go about doing that.

[00:13:15] Nick: Yeah, totally. I love that. I gotta acknowledge the first thing you said as well, because most people listening to this. We'll have heard the things that we're talking about, maybe not in the exact words, oftentimes we think, oh, I know that. Right? I got that. but I love this quote. We need to be reminded way more than we need to be taught.

[00:13:34] Nick: It's not a question of what do I know need to know that's new. It's what do I need to be applying that I already know? That for me is the most fundamental question. Once you've got some sort of level of success, that's the question you need to be asking yourself every day. Really believe that wholeheartedly and it's part of building the dream team.

[00:13:50] Nick: So, to answer that question, Stan, the number one piece of building the dream team is to define where are you going? What is your vision? Or indeed if you are, you're part of your business trajectory where you're really thinking about the legacy overall. but wherever you might be. I think about vision and I like to think about vision in like a three year increment.

[00:14:07] Nick: 'cause you can achieve a lot in three years, but it's not so far out, it seems esoteric. So three years, what does my business really look like? And you've gotta define what that is for you. You've gotta write it down, you've gotta think about it. You've gotta be able to talk about it with a passion. You've gotta be able to talk about it, to kinda light it up as well.

[00:14:22] Nick: And some people are better that others. And so I've got a really clear way of laying out what are the steps to do that, or the process to create the vision. And then you can get really clear about what it is that you want and when you are clear and inspired. About that. You can talk to other people about that.

[00:14:37] Nick: And so when you're building your dream team, the first thing you wanna do is not to say, can you come in and do this task for me? I need someone to process my business. That's not a question. It's rarely a question. Success o over a long time is very rarely a question of capability. It's more a question of motivation and continued consistent showing up to do the thing.

[00:14:57] Nick: And so like having someone come in to say, look, hey, this is my vision for the future. It's more than me. And by the way, of course, all good visions require more than one person to get there. Right? Building something which sucks in people. That's big motivation. So sharing that vision in the brightest detail you possibly can to say to someone, look, this is my vision.

[00:15:15] Nick: This is where I wanna go. This is what I want you to do, to be part of that. How do you feel about being part of this vision and, oh yeah, this is the things we need to do day to day right now, but this is where we're going. That's how you build a dream team and that person doesn't have to look at your vision and say, oh, that's exactly what I want as well.

[00:15:32] Nick: All they need to do is see a little bit of themselves in it and say like, oh, I've defined my vision as well, or I've got a good idea of what it might be. I can see how if I follow your vision, that's gonna help me get mine as well. Or oftentimes people just haven't done that. And they're excited to go. I just wanna be part of that.

[00:15:47] Nick: That sounds awesome. And really that's what leadership is. Leadership is saying, this is what I'm gonna go do. I'm gonna go create something. I don't know exactly how I'm gonna get there, but I know I'm gonna get it. That's what inspires people and those are the type of people that walk past and you look at 'em and go, that person's going somewhere.

[00:16:03] Nick: They know where they're going and people just get up and follow up. that's how I believe the starting point of building that dream team is really be clear about what your vision is and help. Other people associates your vision so they can be a part of it as well and make a real impact.

[00:16:16] Stan: So clarity of vision absolutely sounds pretty important.

[00:16:20] Katie: Clarity and vision certainly is important. Nick, and then say it for me one more time 'cause I'm going to write it down your quote, which hit me right in the heart about needing to remember, not needing to be taught.

[00:16:32] Katie: What was it?

[00:16:34] Nick: Yeah. Not my quote for sure, but it's, you need to be reminded way more than you need to be taught. You need to be reminded way more than you need to be taught.

[00:16:40] Katie: I feel like that, and I know Stan, I can see you nodding. I feel like there's so much wisdom in that, you know, as leaders, as business owners, kind of no matter what industry rent, I can tell you right now, Nick and Stan, I have.

[00:16:52] Katie: So many great books and learned so much wisdom and then slowly after a little while, that starts to fade out and so I love that idea. I think it's so true, so accurate that we need to be reminded much more than we need to be taught. But thank you for sharing that with us. That was a great little tidbit of wisdom.

[00:17:11] Katie: So with all of these financial advisors that you've worked with for these last years, what would you say the number one mistake is that you see them making?

[00:17:21] Nick: Well, we already touched on the vision. I'd say that's the most fundamental piece. That's where I start with everyone. Okay. Hey, what are you trying to achieve right now?

[00:17:27] Nick: I just did a discovery call this morning, a deep dive with an advisor that I met last week, a great guy, and I asked him like, whatcha you trying to achieve right now? And tell me a little bit about his background and where his headspace was around him, but what you trying to achieve right now. You can imagine, right?

[00:17:42] Nick: I want to grow in my business. I wanna have more impact. I want people to really go away and say that they, you gotta work with this guy. He's a great guy, and I want to feel like that I'm really great at what I'm doing. Like it, it's all the things that I repeat themselves oftentimes, but what he didn't, it didn't have was the specificity behind it.

[00:18:00] Nick: Right. So you mentioned this a second ago, Stan, like the clarity of vision is important. Clarity overall is important. If I was to Coming down to three things in terms of what I do, and perhaps you can think of it as like a cycle of success. Number one is create clarity. Is create clarity. Number two is create a strategy.

[00:18:20] Nick: Now here's what I see all the time, okay, Beth, to answer your question, people know they need to set goals. Most people know they need to set goals, they need to have a plan. Life doesn't go to plan if they haven't got one. So they go to that strategy place first. What's my strategy? What's my plan? Now people know that, but most people don't know how to do that properly.

[00:18:36] Nick: But more importantly, they don't do the first thing. They don't create the clarity, so they're not actually sure around where they actually really are, what's most important to them and where they want to get to. So they're creating a strategy based on sand. They're not really having a real foundation to go to.

[00:18:54] Nick: So the strategy doesn't end up working. The plan doesn't really end up working the goal setting's not quite right to get to their outcomes. and then they think, oh, maybe it's me. Maybe I can't do it. Maybe I'm just not destined for that. Maybe I can't go to that next level. And so that's what I see fundamentally every single time.

[00:19:11] Nick: It's a lack of clarity. And it's no fault of anyone. It's not an intelligent thing. It's not an experienced thing. It's just, it's really hard to see yourself. It's really hard to see yourself.

[00:19:20] Katie: No, I agree with that. And lack of clarity is something, no matter kind of what industry you're in, I feel like lack of clarity is probably one of the biggest issues across the board.

[00:19:29] Katie: A lot of times, you know, the boss, the visionary, gets bogged down in those day-to-day operations, training new people, dealing with clients, all of those different things. And I can see that the lack of clarity and vision can cause multiple problems kind of along the path. So I love that's where you start and I appreciate the fact that you bring that up is one of the problems.

[00:19:50] Katie: I feel like, you know, a lot of times with different advisors and coaches, they don't really think through the vision. They're looking at the day-to-day running of operations without really thinking big picture and big picture is what it's all about. The big vision is why everybody shows up to work every day.

[00:20:06] Nick: you see what's in front of you. So a lot of people come to me and say, I don't know what to do. I've got all these different great opportunities in front of me. And by the way, the more successful you get, the more great opportunities you get. Right? But really they're just high level of distractions, right?

[00:20:18] Nick: So people come to me and say, I, I've got these four options. Which one's the best option? And I, it's the wrong question. It's not which one's the best option. It's where do you want to go? I think about this, right? Imagine us three, were walking down a hallway, right? And there's a hallway with all these different doors, like a long hallway.

[00:20:34] Nick: You can barely, you can't really see the end. Just lots of doors. And each of those doors has got like some fancy bells and whistles, right? Some lights coming off, and we're walking through. And okay, Beth, you say, well, what about this door? Let's go into this door. This one looks good. And I say, okay, Alexa.

[00:20:46] Nick: All right. And Stan's like, well, look at this one. Like, this one's really cool. And I said, well, that one. Sounds good as well, but, and then we decide, like we spend some time thinking about which doors to open. We say, okay, you know, you, Kay, Beth, you said that one first. Let's go in. We open the door and it's like one of those big warehouses, like you get in movies where you go and the lights go.

[00:21:03] Nick: They turn on and we're in there. We do some cool things. We find some cool stuff and we spend a couple hours, we come out and we've got like some cool things. Okay, great. Let's carry on. And you can do that for all the way through. And there's nothing wrong with those doors, and they're going into those rooms and they have different levels of merit.

[00:21:17] Nick: But the point is you're not actually going to the thing that you want, you're just bouncing around. So how do you figure out what is the right thing to do? Is going well, I know where I want to go, is the door at the end of this corridor? That's how you get clear about what you want and that's how you make decisions that around distractions or not.

[00:21:34] Nick: 'cause you've already decided upfront. Once you've got those opportunities in front of you, you are already clouded by the opportunities. So defining what you want up front allows you to kind of cut through a knife, the hot knife through butter of getting to your outcomes because you define it from the outset.

[00:21:49] Katie: That makes so much sense. And the door analogy is fantastic. Go ahead Stan.

[00:21:53] Stan: Yeah, I was gonna say we're running long time. You do something called a mind scan assessment, and I wanna hear about that. Tell me about how that works.

[00:22:01] Nick: Minds scan's really cool.

[00:22:03] Nick: There's loads of great assessment tools out there, lots of them and I've had experience with many of them. And the biggest piece for is really just to create awareness and, minds Scan is something that I have proprietary access to. It's a really cool thinking tool. it's almost like you can. An MRI like a snapshot of where your thoughts are in any given moment.

[00:22:22] Nick: And I'd say the thing that really stands Minds scan out is that it's just, it's not a comparison to another set of people, which some of these tools are, although they're Great Minds Scan is just really your thought patterns in any given moment. And it can be really powerful for you to able to see yourself in a different angle, to know where are your biases, what do I prefer?

[00:22:41] Nick: Right? And so to give you an example, one of the areas in Minds Scan measures is how attentive you are to others. So empathy, How much do I value people or discount people? on a scale of plus 10 to minus 10. So our continuum. And so wherever you are, you think it's the right thing, otherwise you wouldn't be there.

[00:22:59] Nick: is awesome to think about it, creating some math, some value around it to say what's some standards places? So it's really fascinating to see where you might stand on it, right? So if you are up to the end of it, like so value in people so much, that's a really great thing. It's a really great thing because you are a people person.

[00:23:15] Nick: you are great with people, but when you overvalue something, it sometimes goes too far for which maybe people take advantage of you a little bit. Maybe give people too many chances. And it's great to kind of be able have that awareness in yourself to say, oh, that's a fascinating thing. So it's really cool to, that's one quick example of it.

[00:23:35] Nick: And you can also do it across teams, which he is immensely powerful. A couple of hours ago, I was talking to one of my best clients. I'm about to go see him, his team out in Washington in a couple of weeks time, and we're gonna do a group mind scan. We haven't done one of them for a couple of years from them, but it's gonna be seven or eight of them.

[00:23:50] Nick: We're gonna do a mind scan. We're about to see how individually they think application to business, application to personal life, but also we have to do a mind scan graph and such that we can see how the whole team thinks as a whole. As a team as a whole, do we bias people positively or negatively? Do we bias taking action positively or negatively?

[00:24:09] Nick: How clearly do we see the structure and the strategy that we have in our business individually and across the team? So it's a really powerful tool to create that awareness or set differently clarity and then make that allows us to get to that next place, which is the strategy we talked about and I didn't mention it, but the third piece is the accountability.

[00:24:27] Nick: It's the checking in to make sure that we're on track.

[00:24:29] Stan: Tool you've developed, right?

[00:24:32] Nick: Yes. it was originally created by a guy called Dr. Robert Hartman back in the early seventies. the research he did for it was actually nominated by for a Nobo Prizes, but the tool itself is proprietary to, to pro as a coach here.

[00:24:44] Nick: it fits out some fascinating stuff.

[00:24:46] Nick: Thanks for listening to today's episode. Hit the Follow button to be notified of new episodes and visit seven dash figure advisor.com for more resources and to connect directly with Nick. See you next time.